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Watch Chernobyl Inside The Meltdown () free Season 1 Episode 3 online in HD on Dailymotion (2026).
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00:17After the fire in the reactor core had gone out, the government commission sent a small
00:22team of specialists to install temperature sensors directly beneath the reactor itself.
00:42They spent 18 hours using a plasma torch to cut through the thick concrete walls.
00:49Under normal circumstances, this would have been an absolutely insane thing to do given
00:55the dangers of radiation.
00:57But like so many things, it seemed like the only answer at the time.
01:08The Soviet people in 1986 had huge trust in their government and were hugely patriotic.
01:16Some folks call it the myth of the Soviet hero.
01:32There was a natural inclination to feel like their union had been forged on this bed of sacrifice.
01:40And the Soviet propaganda machine lapped it up.
01:46The Soviets were saying, your nation is calling you.
01:49It's time to prove your patriotism and do your duty to make a sacrifice.
02:16About two weeks after the initial accident, the Soviets were still faced with a very radioactive
02:21and dangerous situation.
02:24There's a real concern that the nuclear fuel, which is extremely hot, could be flowing to
02:28the bottom of the reactor structure, melting its way through the steel and eventually the
02:33concrete foundation making its way into the groundwater.
02:39An unchecked nuclear core meltdown endangers the water supply for 30 million people, but also
02:46endangers farming, agriculture, and all of that part of Europe for decades.
02:52This was kind of an existential moment for the Soviet high command.
02:59From satellite photographs, one of the things that we observed was they brought in miners to
03:05dig a tunnel under the reactor.
03:10So that we had to go...
03:10The manager told us that we had an accident and that we needed to go on to the
03:17police station in a gas station, something we were the worst.
03:23What happened in Chernobyl, I'll not know.
03:42The miners had to begin construction of a tunnel around 130 meters long, to the point
03:49where they could build a massive heat exchanger.
03:53The idea with the heat exchanger was that it would cool the earth underneath the foundations
03:59of the reactor, so that it would prevent a core meltdown reaching the water table beneath
04:05the building.
04:07It was a hugely ambitious plan, it required 400 or more miners to work around the clock
04:13for more than a month.
04:38It's pretty amazing what they were asking these miners to do.
04:41Show up at an extremely dangerous work zone, essentially to sacrifice themselves.
04:52And in the same tunnel, the government told me that the radiation
05:00is normal.
05:24They were excavating, often using just hand tools, because they feared that if they
05:31disturbed the foundations too much, the whole thing could collapse in Ognam and bury them
05:36alive.
05:56We also, as filmmakers, heard this information about the accident, and decided that we
06:06should be brave and go out there to film the cinema.
06:13If so, to figure out, he's propagandist.
06:38The Soviet narrative was to play up the heroism and bravery of the miners, almost as if they were
06:46in a complete absence of scientific information about whether those same people were in danger.
07:04The mining operation was a complete success.
07:08The heat exchanger itself was built inside the chamber, and the whole thing was ready to go, but it was
07:17never turned on.
07:21The temperature inside the building was gradually declining, and their anxiety about the contamination
07:28of the water table evaporated, so all of the miners' work and sacrifice was a complete waste of time.
07:38I personally did not understand what the radiation is, what the radiation is, what the radiation is, and how it
07:43is dangerous.
07:46It was almost two years ago, one of our miners' workers, after another couple of years, after another couple of
07:56years, after another couple of years, after another couple of years.
08:30The fear of the core meltdown had eventually subsided, but the reactor building itself was still open to the atmosphere.
08:38Now it remains dangerous for people's health.
08:43Mikhail Gorbachev decided that by the end of the year, they needed to have the remains of Unit 4 permanently
08:51entombed,
08:52a building that eventually they christened as sarcophagus.
08:55This whole work will take a lot of time, but it will take a lot of force.
09:00All people from this will be defeated.
09:04The problem was, they couldn't get very close access.
09:07There was a tremendous amount of radioactive material lying around the site,
09:12and so this had to be the next focus, to clean up this unprecedented radiation release.
09:19The most intensively contaminated area was immediately around the reactor in what they called the special zone.
09:32The approach they took was to remove the top level of soil from around the direct vicinity of the reactor,
09:39take that away,
09:40using shielded cab bulldozers that they could put people on.
09:44And for 18 miles in any one direction, they turned over the soil and made this moonscape.
09:54We could not observe how effective this was being, but we knew that these were at least the right things
10:00to do.
10:02But this was just the beginning.
10:06Across more than 5,000 square kilometers, the earth, leaves on the trees, buildings, everything was dangerously contaminated with radioactive
10:17dust.
10:25The Soviet authorities did something that was completely unprecedented.
10:29They moved 100,000 people out of the region and set up an exclusion zone.
10:39And then thousands of workers were brought in from across the Soviet Union and informed,
10:44hey, you're going to get a couple hundred rubles, but that's about it.
10:48Get to work and serve the Soviet cause.
10:59The Soviets are slowly releasing more pictures of the cleanup around Chernobyl.
11:04Moscow says two of the four Chernobyl reactors will go back online this year.
11:12By the middle of the summer of 1986, the area around the plant had begun to resemble a battlefield.
11:2140,000 people were encamped in tents around the Chernobyl plant.
11:28The term liquidators was one that the Soviets used for the people that were brought in, soldiers, conscripts, volunteers,
11:36to clean up the radioactive materials and build the sarcophagus structure to try to contain it.
11:42Now, as the enemy says, the enemy is known, the work is planned.
11:56A lot of the cleanup was essentially experimental.
12:02Spraying buildings with water cannon.
12:08They even began spraying beetroot pulp mixed with water in order to try and control the movement of dust.
12:20All of the animals were rounded up.
12:23And if they can find them, they were euthanized.
12:28It was extraordinarily challenging.
12:33Ultimately, radionuclides could not be destroyed, but could just be moved around.
12:41And certainly, at the very beginning, they lacked dosimeters to check radiation levels,
12:47with the result that nobody was getting an accurate sense of what kind of dose of radiation they were absorbing.
13:07My decision was made literally in the first days after the accident.
13:12So I came to the drafting office and I said, I want to go.
13:18I wanted to help my country.
13:24For people in the West, it's hard to grasp the level of commitment which Soviet people had
13:32in the sacrifice of your own health, the sacrifices in your own life.
14:00When we went to one of the core buildings in the Chernobyl station, it was almost like people just dropped
14:08everything off.
14:08Everything which they had and just gone.
14:16I remember I wandered around in the building and I went into a short yellow corridor.
14:24And suddenly, I realized that the yellow color covering the floor and the windowsills were hundreds, if not thousands, of
14:33yellow butterflies.
14:37I don't understand how they ended up there, but they were all dead.
14:44I looked through the window and I see a guy who was working in a distance of less than a
14:50few hundred meters from the reactor for a welder.
14:55He was just sitting there and he was working so methodically and calmly.
15:02Exposed to probably the largest radiation levels you can ever imagine.
15:09I was almost certain he was whistling something.
15:15That's set in my mind for years how a person can overcome his own fear.
15:46My parents were called for the liquidation of Chernobyl disaster.
15:51After we evacuated the city next to the power plant, they had to go back.
15:58And because we didn't have a place to stay, we were moved to camp for half a year with our
16:06parents.
16:08I was eight years old.
16:13Our hair held lots of radiation, so it was cut.
16:19It was very, very short.
16:21I remember that afterwards, kids were calling us Chernobyl hedgehogs.
16:27And that we should go back where we belong to, to Chernobyl.
16:32I just felt I want to be comforted.
16:35I want to be protected.
16:37I want to be with my family.
16:42So here are letters that we wrote to my mom.
16:48My dearest mom, I cry here every day because we are beaten up here.
16:56Please take us from here as soon as you can, please.
17:01We cannot be here without you.
17:15The tale of this saga is really quite terrifying in terms of its overall impact on people.
17:22Not their health necessarily, but on their livelihoods, maybe hundreds of thousands of people in the Soviet Union.
17:29But it was also clear that it was going to have a radiation impact on the UK.
17:35People outside the Soviet Union are still paying the price for Chernobyl.
17:39In Britain, some sheep still cannot be sold because of high radiation levels.
17:44There was an unexpected heavy fall of rain, which did have an impact on Cumber and North Wales.
17:51From the point of view of the farmers, it was a disaster.
17:55There were almost 10,000 farms affected.
17:58Radioactive rain contaminated the land there to the extent that for decades afterwards,
18:04radiation levels in sheep had to be monitored.
18:08The danger was that actually it got into the food chain.
18:12Orders are down and no one knows when the product will fully regain customer confidence.
18:17I am at a standstill and by not being able to sell them, this is going to make it very,
18:22very hard.
18:23It lasted for almost 30 years.
18:25It was a real threat to the way of life and you never really knew whether actually the danger was
18:32contained or not.
18:45The cleanup operation within the exclusion zone continued.
18:50But they still had to build this sarcophagus, this concrete tomb, to contain the reactor core.
18:58Gorbachev gave the scientists and engineers less than four months to complete one of the most dangerous and ambitious civil
19:06engineering projects in history.
19:15Soviet television today showed pictures of a containment wall going up around the devastated Chernobyl nuclear power plant.
19:23The Soviet's initial attempt to try to cover over the destroyed reactor building was built with the means they had
19:29at the time,
19:30which was remote-controlled cranes, remote-controlled concrete pumpers that could be done very quickly.
19:52It was my task to finalize construction of sarcophagus and start-up unit number one.
20:03It was my task to finalize construction of sarcophagus and start-up unit number one.
20:05the building of sarcophagus was made especially difficult because it couldn't approach it for anything more than minutes at a
20:35time.
20:35to get any work done.
20:52The roof of Unit 3 had been covered with debris
20:56thrown out of reactor number 4 by the force of the explosion.
21:02It was like a kind of radioactive assault course.
21:10There were pieces of reactor graphite, pieces of nuclear fuel.
21:15You could only safely remain up there near some of those pieces of debris
21:19for minutes or even seconds without receiving a lethal dose.
21:24So to build the sarcophagus, that had to be dealt with.
21:28And the approach they took was use of robotics.
21:47They had two different kinds of robots.
21:50One was imported from West Germany, a colossal expanse,
21:56that was specifically designed to deal with radioactive hazards.
22:00They also had a couple of robots that were initially built
22:03by the Soviet Union themselves to explore the surface of the moon.
22:16The idea was that the robots would simply shunt the debris
22:19off the edge of the roof and into what remained of reactor number 4.
22:29And that would then be covered by the sarcophagus.
22:45But we saw even the robots failed.
22:47Their electronics couldn't stand the radiation levels for long periods of work.
23:02They were completely out of control.
23:04You can't control them anymore.
23:07So then they useless.
23:25The engineers and scientists in charge of the clean-up operation of the roof
23:29were left with what they felt was no alternative.
23:33They had to send human beings into one of the most dangerous places
23:37on the face of the earth.
23:39.
23:39.
23:39.
23:39.
23:39.
23:39.
23:51.
23:52.
23:52.
23:55Are you already at the top?
23:56No, let's go.
23:58Let's go.
24:00Let's go.
24:00Let's go.
24:00Let's go.
24:03Seriously, let's go.
24:08The commanders of the operation were under no illusion
24:11about how dangerous this was.
24:14To scrape pieces of debris off the roof and run with it
24:18and then throw it into what remained a reactor 4
24:20and sprint back to safety as quickly as possible.
24:29When I got there first time, I was so psyched up.
24:35Obviously, adrenaline was running through the roof
24:37and everything was in a complete blur.
24:46You had to wait for hours sweating, waiting to get there.
24:53I'm not sure how much they were told about the level of danger
24:56they were facing going into it, but they did what they were told.
25:00They began to call themselves bio-robots.
25:18You have to put the protective gear on you.
25:23two lead sheets and very heavy industrial respirators,
25:30which is supposed to protect from the radioactive dust.
25:34This was essentially all we had.
25:58I finally got up to the level.
26:02And you go to that little bunker where the door is opening to hell.
26:11That's what they call it.
26:23Your heart is pumping incredibly fast.
26:30Your mind is nowhere near your normal condition.
26:45I have to collect whatever I can and throw it down to the ground from the roof.
26:51And this is what all your focus, all your concentration was all about.
27:04There's a man there with a stopwatch and they could go for maybe 30, 45 seconds
27:09until they had gotten their allowable dose of radiation.
27:14Not only were there these huge pieces of debris,
27:17but there were also pieces of the reactor core itself
27:21that had melted into the bitumen.
27:23They essentially become welded to the top of the roof.
27:32That asphalt was so unwilling to be cut.
27:36I just felt incredible rage
27:40to the point that I wanted to literally fall down
27:43and start tearing it apart with my teeth
27:46because it was such an incredible intense desire
27:50to do what they were asking us to do.
28:05And then what happens?
28:08An incredible relief.
28:18I got very unusual physical reaction, as if I had a heavy, severe cold.
28:25So I wasn't able to breathe.
28:30I spoke to many people who were there.
28:32Some of it had an incredible headache almost immediately.
28:37Almost everybody had something.
28:44The number of people that they ran through, thousands of people,
28:49getting a limit of dose and then, you know, being sent on their way,
28:53having done all they could.
28:57I had six trips total to the roof.
29:01I have never been so drained,
29:05not only physically,
29:07but emotionally as well and mentally.
29:31The number of people who were there were
29:35the consequences of the accident,
29:38they are already on Earth.
30:05Under any circumstances, would be extremely difficult.
30:09But the construction of the sarcophagus
30:11was also subject to the absurd demands of Soviet politics.
30:16To celebrate the restarting of reactor number one,
30:32the commanders of the operation made the decision
30:35to send a trio of radiation scouts
30:37with a red banner to the top of the chimney
30:40that was above the reactors.
30:43I remember that, you know, people were risking their lives
30:47because the debris wasn't cleaned up yet.
31:02Let's put a point.
31:07While you couldn't get much scientific information
31:10about the true danger of what was going on,
31:14there were no shortage of stories
31:15of our noble military,
31:17our noble Civil Defense Corps.
31:33The narrative was still,
31:35we are the unique and remarkable Soviet Union.
31:39And I viewed it with astonishment.
31:42When the war was after the election,
31:57I thought.
31:58It was the secret of this century.
32:00The war was after the election of the North
32:01To the war, the crime was arrived.
32:01The war was after the destruction of the US
32:02the war is that they believed
32:02that they were a stake in the war.
32:02And the war was also made
32:04The war was a matter of respect.
32:11about that, endangering people's lives for symbolism.
32:17This is the stupidest thing.
32:41And that's why, yes, it was necessary to raise the flag on this dirty pipe to shout out to everyone
32:51that we won the radiation.
33:06Who won the radiation, I don't know.
33:10Because as she was, she killed people, so she killed them.
33:25The wreckage of the Chernobyl nuclear reactor that exploded is now buried under a 200-foot-tall concrete tomb.
33:34The completion of the sarcophagus meant that the wreckage of Unit 4 was effectively sealed off from the remaining units
33:42of the plan.
33:58I remember Niklas. He was in charge of the whole project.
34:04I said, would you not want to look at the sarcophagus?
34:09Yes, of course.
34:10The engineering skill with remote tools was very impressive.
34:19But it had only a limited lifespan.
34:23Although it was an achievement to have it completed at all, it certainly wasn't the most secure or sound construction.
34:32The sarcophagus was really necessary just as much for propaganda reasons as for reasons of radiological safety.
34:57They could say that they put Chernobyl and the disaster behind them.
35:03Once again, the Soviet Union had triumphed over an implacable enemy.
35:16In the beginning of 1988, they began to reveal diseases, which you didn't know before.
35:22After all, you practically didn't know about them.
35:30It's impossible.
35:32It's impossible.
35:32It's only possible to support it, so that it didn't progress.
35:36It's nothing more.
35:37It's impossible to do with a weak spirit here.
35:40They didn't leave.
35:43And those who left, they will work.
35:50It's not my voice.
35:52It's nice to remember my voice, what I was when I was.
35:55Well, since I had cancer.
36:03I never regretted going there, and I never will.
36:08I've had nightmares, and I had quite a few health issues.
36:14But I was so needed.
36:19I was so demanded.
36:21I literally was important there.
36:24Chernobyl made me a man, and that will never change.
36:34600,000 people.
36:37The liquidators.
36:39They were heroic and brave and servants of the Soviet Union.
36:45Nothing about that part of their propaganda campaign was untrue.
36:50I don't think that there was a myth of Soviet sacrifice.
36:54I think that was real.
36:58Not just the Soviet people, but the rest of the world owed their bravery a debt of gratitude.
37:05And perhaps most important, the central government owed them the truth of what caused this catastrophe.
37:27Ever since the dreadful accident at Chernobyl, the world has been waiting anxiously for the Russians to explain what went
37:33wrong.
37:34The International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna will discuss the Soviet disaster.
37:42It was absolutely a priority for the U.S. government to learn what had triggered this accident,
37:47and what the circumstances were that led to this disaster.
37:50There had been dribs and drabs, particularly of the recovery, the liquidators, the miners.
37:55But a comprehensive story hadn't yet been presented.
37:59We felt at the IA that the main thing after an accident is to help its members.
38:05But the second is that the world must learn from the accident.
38:10I was there, and the atmosphere at the conference was one of great anticipation.
38:16This is a time of great change in the Soviet Union.
38:19This is Gorbachev's perestroika.
38:20This is Glasnost.
38:22And that was supposed to be about openness.
38:26The entire world's scientific community had an eye and an ear on what are the Soviets going to say,
38:33and is it going to be in any way honest?
38:42The person put in charge of presenting the Soviet Union's report about the accident in Vienna was Valeriy Lygarsov.
38:52He was one of the leading members of the government commission that was sent down to Chernobyl from Moscow
38:59in the hours after the explosion took place.
39:07And he remained there for weeks afterwards, leading specific parts of the cleanup operation,
39:14and then investigating the causes, which was regarded as classified.
39:22In Vienna, Dr. Lygarsov prepared to present from a technical standpoint what had gone on.
39:30I remember talking to Moscow about this.
39:33I said, how long time will he need?
39:35Well, perhaps five hours, they said.
39:38Five hours, I said.
39:39This is not a party conference.
39:42No, no, we will need a lot of time.
39:45Dr. Lygarsov went over the written report for at least two or three days.
39:53Broadly speaking, the Soviet explanation of the accident was that it resulted from an experiment that went horribly off the
40:02rails.
40:03Inherent in the explanation came out that the reactor design was flawed, certainly from a Western standpoint.
40:11It didn't have the sort of radioactive material containment philosophy, the safety philosophy that Western reactors had.
40:19We are going to improve the safety systems, taking into account the Chernobyl accident.
40:26Here was a moment where the Gorbachev regime was getting credit for putting science first, propaganda to the rear, and
40:35acknowledging a series of mistakes.
40:37Most delegates, it seems, are impressed by the Soviets' frankness.
40:41I have been astonished, as I think most participants have been, at how forthcoming they have proved to be here.
40:49Also implicit in their description was a certain blame for the operators.
40:53Things the operators did that they shouldn't have done.
40:57The Russians believe human error caused a deadly explosion and radiation leaked.
41:01Most people in the West were happy to take their word for that.
41:05The problem was that all they had was the information that was released to them, and that was extremely carefully
41:11edited.
41:21There are scientists in Vienna who say they don't believe your delegation is still saying as much about Chernobyl as
41:27it knows.
41:28Are you saying as much as you know?
41:31Everything that I've heard is correct.
41:37Of course, there still remains quite a lot of information
41:43which has not yet been sufficiently processed by Soviet experts.
41:52As time went by, Legasov attempted to bring about the sorts of reforms that he thought were necessary to improve
41:59the way the nuclear state in the USSR ran.
42:09This is the guy finally coming forward with the promises of Glasnost.
42:13But it was only in the wake of Chernobyl when he discovered exactly the extent of the secrecy and corruption
42:22of the Soviet nuclear state.
42:34Legasov became more and more depressed and more and more desperate.
42:39His health was shattered by the degree of radiation exposure he'd been subjected to.
42:44And he began to realize how rotten the USSR was at its core.
42:59Legasov's suicide made him one of tens of thousands of victims of the Chernobyl accident.
43:14So what did go wrong at Chernobyl?
43:17The Russians say it was operator error.
43:20Ultimately, in Vienna, the Soviet report did not tell the whole truth of what had happened.
43:41It was pretty obvious that there would be a criminal trial in the Soviet Union, attempting to shift blame from
43:47the reactor design to the actions of individuals instead.
43:52There's no doubt that there is an invasion of the Soviet Union, but it is greater than the much and
43:56more.
43:58It's greater than the due date of the time.
43:59The working force was.
43:59The war?
44:01The war?
44:02The war?
44:04The war is held by the war.
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